


I Guess You Guys Aren’t Ready for That Yet

by Masu_Trout



Category: Prey (Video Game 2017)
Genre: Alien/Human Relationships, Curiosity, Gen, Pre-Relationship, Time Travel, Uneasy Allies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26369038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: In a week, Morgan Yu will be in orbit aboard Talos I. All he has to do is get through one last round of Alex's bizarre tests. But next week keeps feeling further and further away, and he's having these bizarre dreams—And that's when the alien shows up in his bed, and things getreallystrange.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 63
Collections: We Die Like Fen 4: We Lived to Die Afen





	I Guess You Guys Aren’t Ready for That Yet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wednesday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wednesday/gifts).



Morgan was having strange dreams.

Not that _that_ was anything new, but normally his dreams were something a little more comprehensible, if bizarre: teeth falling out, naked in the middle of an important meeting, chased by monsters, all the good old classics. 

This one had been—different. He remembered standing in the dark, swallowed up by shadow, and staring at a shape that was and wasn't him. It was like taking a Rorschach test, almost, if Rorschach blots could make his eyes bleed.

Maybe it was stress, he thought, rolling out of bed to the sound of Alex calling him. Some weird expression of impostor syndrome, maybe? Or new job worries? Hell, the promise of going out into space long-term was a big enough life change all on its own, it wasn't even as if he had to reach far to figure out why all of this might be stressing him out just a little.

Morgan grimaced as he shrugged his way into his stiff TranStar uniform, making a fist to test the give of the thick, rubbery material. Dream interpretation was barely more than pseudoscience, really, nothing he needed to spend his time or mental energy on. It was just that—

The rest of the dream was fading already, but he still remembered that face. His, and not his. It had been barely more than a shadow, like a splatter of ink given depth and life, but it had still somehow seemed like looking in a mirror.

Maybe he'd ask Alex later, once he was finished with whatever today's tests were going to be. He'd always liked weird, unconventional, metaphysical stuff. He'd probably get a kick out of Morgan's weird dreams.

\--

Morgan woke up with a pounding headache, to Alex's voice next to his ear and a memory of ink-black, a mirror, a face that wasn't his—

He stumbled out of bed, rubbing at his aching head and his sore eye. Had he done something last night? No, no way, he'd been so careful not to screw anything up the day before Alex's big TranStar tests, determined to make sure he could get out into orbit as quickly as possible. But _fuck_ , his skull ached, and that weird, unsettling memory— _dream_ —wasn't helping.

A face made of ink and shadow, flowing and changing. Completely inhuman, inscrutable, but...

He shook it away with a groan as he clumsily yanked on his new TranStar suit. The material, when he tested its give, at least felt half-decent: think and rubbery and solid, easy to move in. Almost familiar.

Morgan needed to get some breakfast in him, and some caffeine, and stop thinking about that weird fucking dream. A nightmare like that wasn't going to get the better of him. Not on a day like today.

\--

Morgan woke with a shout, remembering: _him and not him, form without face, a body made of ink_.

It felt almost familiar. Almost—no. No. He'd never seen a face like that before, never seen shadows and ink move like that. He stumbled to the window until the twin comforts of early-morning San Francisco spread out beneath him and his brother's voice in his ear helped his breathing even out to normal.

He was going a little bit crazy, wasn't he? From stress, or from anticipation, or from something else entirely. But there was nothing to worry about. He was fine.

Fingers gripping the edge of the windowsill, he pressed his forehead against the sun-warmed glass. He was fine.

\--

Morgan woke—

To the _thing_ from his nightmares hovering above him, a twisted ribbon of shadow and ink with no face at all, limbs that ended in loose fingerless appendages gripping his wrists tight. He thrashed, trying to break free; gulped in a breath to try and shout with...

"Shhhh," said the thing above him, in his voice. "Shh, shh, you need to be quiet, we're going to get caught."

Morgan froze. He had to be dreaming. That was the only way to explain this. Any of this. Inkblots didn't come to life to assail him in his bed, they didn't steal his voice to speak to him—and they _didn't_ do it while wearing a face that looked impossibly similar to his own despite being made of nothing but vague impressions of shadow against shadow, liquid and alien.

"This is a nightmare," Morgan murmured. "This is an awful fucking dream, that's all, this isn't _real_." 

He was relieved to hear he could still speak, that at least his own voice hadn't disappeared when the creature above him took it.

"Sometimes I think so too," said the creature above him, a rueful twist to its—Morgan's—voice. It almost made it worse to hear something so familiar out of something so impossible. "I didn't exactly expect this, you know? And now I can't... I can't think like I used to anymore. I'm not what I used to be."

Morgan shifted his arm up just slightly, enough he could slam the back of his hand against the nightstand next to his bed. It hurt like a bitch. He didn't wake up. Shit.

Above him, the creature that wasn't him was... changing. Its features ran like water, like, ink, flowing and shifting across its face to form peaks and valleys and ridges that grew more and more familiar as Morgan watched. Color shifted, from black to beige and peach and white and red, tones Morgan knew all too well. A seam opened in its face; it flexed its new jaw in a strangely human way as tongue and teeth and gums began to sprout from the shadows inside. More ripples and seams, higher up, became eyes and ears and nose. Hair grew, features shifted...

And then it was his own face staring down at him, a perfect mirror.

Morgan didn't scream. Not because he didn't want to, but because some deep-buried animal instinct inside him was telling him he needed to be still, be calm, do anything and everything it might take to survive this.

This thing—this _clone_ could kill him right now. It had his face already. Why would it do anything else?

"What are you?" Morgan asked hoarsely. His voice didn't shake. Adrenaline dulled the fear, turned his mind towards nothing but survival and a desperate, burning curiosity. "What the hell do you want with me?"

The look his duplicate gave him then was stranger than anything else he'd seen so far: achingly fond, filled with a kind of intense protectiveness he wasn't sure how to react to. He wanted to believe he was mistaken, that the expression meant something else entirely, but—that was his own face. He knew what his emotions look like.

"I'm not you," said the creature, said Morgan, "but not for lack of other people's trying. And as to what I'm here for... to protect you, mostly. And others too, if I can. But I need your help for that."

"Protect me? From what, Bay Area traffic?"

The grin Morgan got then wasn't exactly amused. Closer to sad, really. "You're not in SF anymore, Toto. People have been lying to you. I want to explain, but we need to get out of here first. It was hard to get _here_ in the first place, I had to..." A shake of the head. "No, that's not important right now. We can't just sit here while I try to explain."

"By sit here, you mean I lie on my back and you pin me down? Because I'm not exactly trying to _just sit here_ right now."

The clone winced. "I know this is going to sound crazy, but can you trust me? Just for a few minutes?"

It wouldn't exactly be right to answer _yes_ , because he sure as hell didn't have any reason to trust this inhuman and bizarre copy of himself. Especially not when it—he?—was asking Morgan to trust him over his own sense, to believe the words of a shadow were more real than the bright blue sky overhead and distant hum of traffic down below and the sunlight warming his room.

And yet, he found himself believing. He'd seen the man kneeling on top oh him right now form out of smoke and shadow. If one impossible thing could happen today, why not more? And, even more than that, even deeper: he _wanted_ to trust this man. Wanted to believe the emotions he saw flickering across his face were real, wanted to believe whatever eerie connection there was between them might not be so nightmarish after all.

Morgan sighed. "Okay," he said, "Fine, sure, you've got five minutes. But if you don't start showing me some real crazy shit within the next few minutes"—as if what he'd seen already wasn't crazy enough—"then I'm going running right out of here, all right?"

The expression that crossed his clone's face then was the most genuine thing Morgan had ever seen: relief, hope, excitement.

"Great," he said, releasing his wrists to instead help him to his feet. "Come on, we need to get moving, we don't have much time." 

"Yeah, you'd better be willing to explain _that_ to me too," Morgan groused, standing up on legs that felt far too shaky. "Time for what?"

His eye ached. He rubbed at it, absentmindedly, but that didn't make the pain fade any.

"Oh man," said the clone, "that's... I'll explain that first, all right? Soon." And then, throwing Morgan a grin that Morgan recognized perfectly from his own face, the one Morgan wore every time he was about to do something incredibly stupid and had no intention of stopping, he added, "You up for trying save your world?"


End file.
